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Very simple.
So say there is a village of 100 anonymous people held hostage. You have the ability to save those one hundred people, but in order to do so, you have to kill your best friend.
Poll: Would you kill your best friend?No (42) 70% Yes (18) 30% 60 total votes Your vote: Would you kill your best friend? (Vote): Yes
(Vote): No
Say there is a village of 100 anonymous people held hostage. You have the ability to save those one hundred people, but in order to do so, you have to kill one anonymous person.
Poll: Would you kill him/her?Yes (43) 74% No (15) 26% 58 total votes Your vote: Would you kill him/her? (Vote): Yes
(Vote): No
Why did you choose the answer you chose?
EDIT: For clarification purposes, it's a very strict dichotomy: either you save your best friend and 100 people die, or you kill your best friend and save 100 lives. The same goes for the other question.
+ Show Spoiler +My brother is going through medical school interviews right now, and he posed this question to me a few hours ago. We ended up getting into a heated debate and I said some things he took a lot of offense to and I deeply regret. I shortly found out that entire family disagrees with what I think, but I am incapable of understanding why that is. I might post my opinion later, but for now, I don't want to influence anyone's thoughts. This is actually very distressing to me, despite the fact that I know there isn't a black and white angle to this, I still feel like there is a very key part that I'm completely missing. At least I hope there is, because otherwise it means I'm a complete lunatic because I can't even begin to understand the other side.
EDIT2:
+ Show Spoiler +Since this has already generated enough results I'm going to post the issue I had with it...
What Sultan.P said is the exact dichotomy I had with my brother; he also refused to play God (as it were) and said that it is impossible for him to judge the worthiness of human life, while I was on the same side as the purported Russian and agreed with him: essentially, that the needs of the many outweigh the few.
However, I've come to realize that simple numbers is an overly simplistic way to quantify something like human life, and that it simply does not do justice to something that is so heavy. An interesting thought that I thought about was in-line with the Russian's: if one healthy individual can save five lives by donating all his organs, then why do we not simply kill the healthy individual and take his organs? Theoretically speaking that seems to be the same issue: after all, in both scenarios we're exchanging the life of one normal person for that of many in peril. Putting things into perspective though, the situation I just mentioned many would consider morally evil (I do myself as well).
Yet, that being said, if I had to make a choice in this scenario, no matter what, I inevitably gravitate to the killing of both my best friend and the anonymous individual. I'm actually startled by the difference in polling results. The difference between killing a best friend and killing an anonymous individual is simply the personal relation/attitude, and I was under the erroneous assumption that anyone who was willing to kill the anonymous individual would not let mere feelings interrupt with their judgment. And of course, I'm completely wrong. Still, I breathe a slight sigh of relief and I understand something else my brother was talking about: that there perhaps a significant part of humanity is not only the ability to act on empathy and sympathy, rather than cold callous reasoning, but also the choice to act irrationally (that is, act against simple logic). And perhaps that's a good thing after all.
Or maybe I'm just writing a load of bullcrap. lol. Anyways, thanks guys. I feel a lot better after this.
 
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Depends on who the 100 people are.
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If each life is considered equal, then both answers should be "Yes".
However, you have an emotional attachment to your best friend, so I could totally understand why people wouldn't kill their best friend to save people they don't know, but would allow one anonymous death to save one hundred anonymous deaths (as that's an obvious "greater good" scenario, unclouded by subjectivity).
This is a classic psychological hypothetical situation (usually with the anonymous killing done before the personal killing) to see how the volunteers react. I'm pretty sure most of them react differently- willing to kill people they don't know, but not willing to kill their mother or best friend.
+ Show Spoiler +I chose to kill the anonymous person but not kill my best friend, for the emotional attachment reason I explained above. I assumed that I knew that I didn't know any of the 100 people held hostage, nor the 1 anonymous person being killed in the second situation, as it seemed a bit ambiguous.
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Probably, but I'd like to meet the people, as I certainly don't value all life equally
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One question : if I don't save these hostages, are they assured to die, or there is still a chance than SWAT or whoever saves them ? The way the question is currently worded implies that killing your best friend would instantly release them, but it doesn't mean they would die for sure otherwise.
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Yes, you're right. I should've made that more clear.
For clarification purposes, it's a very strict dichotomy: either you save your best friend and 100 people die, or you kill your best friend and save 100 lives. The same goes for the other question.
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On September 02 2011 11:12 DarkOptik wrote:
Yes, you're right. I should've made that more clear.
For clarification purposes, it's a very strict dichotomy: either you save your best friend and 100 people dies, or you kill your best friend and save 100 people lives. The same goes for the other question.
I assumed that I knew that I didn't know any of the 100 people held hostage, nor the 1 anonymous person being killed in the second situation, as it seemed a bit ambiguous.
Everyone who dies besides your best friend are people who you don't know?
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Yes, that is correct. I'll clarify in the OP further.
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Are the hostages gonna be killed or not?
upd.: I see now.
I wouldn`t kill anyone. :o
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Blazinghand
United States25551 Posts
I would kill a random person to save a hundred random people. This much is certain. I assume we're talking about flipping a switch or something. If I have to kill someone in-person I will probably not be able to do it.
I would... with great difficulty... probably maybe kill my best friend to save a hundred random people. I'm not sure I'd actually do this, but I think I'm more likely to do so than not. If I had to kill my best friend in person I will probably not be able to do it.
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If everyone except my friend is anonymous I would be forced to kill my friend. It would suck though.
EDIT: I would also expect blowjobs at minimum from all the attractive women in that 100 afterwards.
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I think the right thing to do is to kill friend and kill anonymous person for the 100 hostages. Probably wouldn't be able to do it though.
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It would depend on what my friend wants.
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Blazinghand
United States25551 Posts
On September 02 2011 11:21 XXGeneration wrote:
It would depend on what my friend wants.
I'm assuming you aren't able to contact him... if you are you might want to ask him though lol
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Ah, reminds me of the good ol trolley question I heard about in my gen. philosophy class. They were way more absurd, so I answered yes to both of these =p
In theory I see the situation as trading 1 life for 1 hundred. I understand that having to kill someone would put an incredible, perhaps overwhelming amount of guilt and would probably suffer from depression for the rest of my life. It's quite possible I'd end up suicidal or insane. So it'd be trading 2 lives for 1 hundred. Worth it.
In practice, no. These hypothetical scenarios always have billions of other questions to ask, (can I talk to my friend beforehand, how can i be sure the others will live, what kind of people are the hostaegs, etc.) and most of the time when i'm given the options, they're under perfect circumstances, i.e, killing my friend/stranger would guaranteeing the freedom of the hostages, I can't talk to anyone else, can't exchange my life instead, w/e. In real life I would never trust a captor to keep his word in a hostage situation.
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Yes to the first, no to the second.
Obviously no extreme case will exist, or if it does, can be nicely/logically solved by any given branch of ethics (after all, all ethics are based on some arbitrary first-priority values). However, given the situation, since Deontology and Consequentialism always lead to the whole "moral paralysis" or "aggregation/moral calculus" issue, I choose Contractualism for my argument.
I argue that despite the burden of death that the village faces, I can reasonably reject the action based on the fact that my friend also faces a burden of death. These individual reasons cancel and now I can choose which one to pick. Even if we allow for the case of appeal by aggregation (that is, there are more lives to save), I can still reasonably reject killing my friend by weighing my psychological burden due to the action against the inaction I take to let the village die. Obviously this is based on my personal values yet again, but with my interests at hand while I am the actor, I will outweigh the consequentialist aspect with my heavier burden of actually having to kill. This means that I will not kill my best friend for the village.
There is relatively less of a psychological burden in killing an anonymous person (again, personal morals come into hand, but this can be generalized further to others unless you have no friends), which means in this case a rough leveling can be done and the aggregation factor outweighs, meaning that I WILL save 100 for the sacrifice of one.
In the end, you will end up prioritizing your interests over that of others when you become the actor, no matter how slight it is or how disgusting you find that bias. Else you cannot fully weigh based upon everybody's interests.
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Then if we don't know any of these people, I think that once again we can apply the Monkeysphere theory.
Immoral and unfair, yet we have no control over this feeling of not caring most of the time.
Which isn't that bad either otherwise we would be depressed for a week every time a plane crashes. I'm not even talking about wars.
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The question is IMO pointless to ponder considering that no one here will ever find themselves in such a situation in this lifetime.
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On September 02 2011 11:31 Geovu wrote:
The question is IMO pointless to ponder considering that no one here will ever find themselves in such a situation in this lifetime.
I mean, I guess it's pointless to ponder how the universe was created, since no one will be creating a universe.
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I'm hesitant to get into an ethics discussion on TL, but if anyone (OP?) is interested in learning more on this topic, I can recommend some literature.
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So I have pondered this question a ton before, or similar questions and I came to this conclusion: my best friend would willingly give their life for 100 people. That makes the decision simple.
As for the anonymous person, I would still have to choose the same, but still, there is a huge grey area there to consider. Who is posing this challenge? Is that what the person wants? What are he motivations? In general, I would say know to killing anyone, but depending on circumstances, it might be justified.
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This is that classical question of morally justified questions. Unfortunately, I have to say I would try to save those 100 lives. Still, if there was a context, that would be great. I mean, are you saving 100 serial killers? or..... and is this like apocalypse or hostage situation??
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No to both.
The other people taking the village hostage can kill whomever they want if they want, I will not kill a single person.
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Quandary ethics lol.
They never represent actual situations do they.
They also never allow you to pick what a truly good man would do- sacrifice himself.
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On September 02 2011 11:38 CaptainPlatypus wrote:
I'm hesitant to get into an ethics discussion on TL, but if anyone (OP?) is interested in learning more on this topic, I can recommend some literature.
A tad. I'd be down for a good read. Hopefully deep, but not too dense?
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On September 02 2011 11:31 Geovu wrote:
The question is IMO pointless to ponder considering that no one here will ever find themselves in such a situation in this lifetime.
Those who cannot handle simple matters cannot be trusted to handle serious matters.
In the frame of this hypothetical situation:
1. No
2. No
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On September 02 2011 11:31 Geovu wrote:
The question is IMO pointless to ponder considering that no one here will ever find themselves in such a situation in this lifetime.
Sigh, the point of this brain teaser isn't so you can know what to do when the day you have to kill your best friend to save 100 villagers. You're supposed to pose the question to yourself and reason the morally / ethically correct answer for yourself and try to coherently explain your answer/reasoning. It's just a mental exercise; use your brain! Why even post a reply if you're just going to act like a moron?
I answered No to both questions. The first question for me was a no brainer - I just wouldn't kill my best friend / loved ones to save 100 random ppl I don't know. An interesting side note is to consider is how a change in quantity in the question could possibly change my response. For example, if the question was instead: Kill your best friend to save 100,000 lives, 1M lives, 5B lives, my answer would change. Where is the line drawn? No one can really say.
The second question was harder for me to answer, but I also put down No. My reasoning was I just can't ethically / morally kill some random person to save 100 unknown lives, because they are all innocent and I refuse to be the arbiter of the fates of these people since this scenario was presented to me involuntarily. They are all just random ass people, I can't say it would be better off to have +99 ppl than +1. For all I know that one person I have to kill is the future Einstein and I wouldn't kill him to save 100 random people. Then again, maybe the village is full of Einsteins and the random guy will contribute nothing to society, or worse yet make things worse for society.
I can't remember the name of the article, but I read for a class something similar to the question posed here and they talked about some Russian mathematician who would've answered Yes to both these questions in a heart beat. He even said he would kill his son if he could save two random people's live, and in fact when he learned that he could save someone's life by donating his kidney, he immediately underwent an operation to give his kidney to some random person in need. Pretty wild eh?
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On September 02 2011 11:49 Sultan.P wrote:
They are all just random ass people, I can't say it would be better off to have +99 ppl than +1. For all I know that one person I have to kill is the future Einstein and I wouldn't kill him to save 100 random people. Then again, maybe the village is full of Einsteins and the random guy will contribute nothing to society, or worse yet make things worse for society.
If all of these peoples characteristics are completely unknown, then the chances of any of them being a saint genius or future hitler are unknown to you and can't factor into your decision. Therefore it still comes down to if you value 100 lives more than one.
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My best friend, unlike the anonymous people, has earned standing in my eyes. We've been through hell and back together, and I'd die for him without question.
As for one anonymous person to save 100, well, at that point, it's the greater benefit to save the 100.
If it was a question of me dying to save the 100 anonymous, I like to think I'd be able to do that. But knowingly sacrificing my best friend to save people I've never met would haunt me forever.
Maybe I'm a bit callous in this, but I think someone who would trust me with his life, and that of his wife and daughter, (and vice versa, I'd trust him with my wife and son) isn't someone I could knowingly sacrifice for the benefit of random people.
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OP, you are also mucking up the problem by saying these people are held hostage, this bring the people who are holding them hostage's responsibility into the picture as well as uncertainty over the outcome (people don't trust terrorists).
A more neutral problem would involve natural disasters or whatnot.
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Since this has already generated enough results I'm going to post the issue I had with it...
What Sultan.P said is the exact dichotomy I had with my brother; he also refused to play God (as it were) and said that it is impossible for him to judge the worthiness of human life, while I was on the same side as the purported Russian and agreed with him: essentially, that the needs of the many outweigh the few.
However, I've come to realize that simple numbers is an overly simplistic way to quantify something like human life, and that it simply does not do justice to something that is so heavy. An interesting thought that I thought about was in-line with the Russian's: if one healthy individual can save five lives by donating all his organs, then why do we not simply kill the healthy individual and take his organs? Theoretically speaking that seems to be the same issue: after all, in both scenarios we're exchanging the life of one normal person for that of many in peril. Putting things into perspective though, the situation I just mentioned many would consider morally evil (I do myself as well).
Yet, that being said, if I had to make a choice in this scenario, no matter what, I inevitably gravitate to the killing of both my best friend and the anonymous individual. I'm actually startled by the difference in polling results. The difference between killing a best friend and killing an anonymous individual is simply the personal relation/attitude, and I was under the erroneous assumption that anyone who was willing to kill the anonymous individual would not let mere feelings interrupt with their judgment. And of course, I'm completely wrong. Still, I breathe a slight sigh of relief and I understand something else my brother was talking about: that there perhaps a significant part of humanity is not only the ability to act on empathy and sympathy, rather than cold callous reasoning, but also the choice to act irrationally (that is, act against simple logic). And perhaps that's a good thing after all.
Or maybe I'm just writing a load of bullcrap. lol. Anyways, thanks guys. I feel a lot better after this.
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On September 02 2011 12:02 sob3k wrote:
OP, you are also mucking up the problem by saying these people are held hostage, this bring the people who are holding them hostage's responsibility into the picture as well as uncertainty over the outcome (people don't trust terrorists).
A more neutral problem would involve natural disasters or whatnot.
That's true, although I think the vast majority of people know what I meant by this thought experiment. I'll keep that in mind, however.
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Im guessing op said no to the first one and his family disagrees with him.
In the meantime, yes and yes. But the fact of the matter is that its too hard to achieve this vacuum, so i dont even use the answers to these questions as a moral indicator.
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Common ethical dilemma, frequently a conflict of utilitarianism/deontology. I feel that omitting to prevent evil is not the moral equal of committing the evil, so I would not kill the person for the 100.
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I kinda want to change my second answer to no... but I could go either way with a rash decision for the second question.
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I think that morally I should kill my friend I just wouldn't because I am not a morally upstanding person, as someone mentioned this basically boils down to the whole deontology vs. consequentialism thing, I personally think that deontology has more philosophical justification but consequentialism is the better moral theory. To your edit I actually discussed that kill someone in the hospital to give out their organs scenario with a philosophy grad student when I was taking a course at camp and he pointed out that it's pretty easy to say it's morally wrong and adhere to consequentialism because if you were to kill someone in the hospital to harvest their organs it would cause more aggregate harm as people wouldn't go to hospitals if that happened it would be illegal and the doctors would go to jail etc... if you make it unrealistic enough to say that there are no side-consequences then sure do it but it doesn't really mean anything once the scenario is that unrealistic.
Edit: Also to your problem with doing it the whole "playing god" thing I think that comes to what's called the act-omission distinction, basically do you believe that an omission, not acting, has the same moral weight as any other action. I firmly believe that yes refusing to act is just another action in which case in your second scenario assuming that all you have to do is make the choice, going through no effort on your own, then in my eyes you are killing 99 anonymous people.
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Maybe to both.
I don't see myself being able to take the life of my best friend, even if he asked me to, with all the laughs we've had and such. It'd be such a waste because he's an amazing person, but if the town was filled with all really good people..... I'd have to be in the situation.
As for number 2, Is this person I'm killing a good person? Is he/she still young, or is he/she an older person?
Although if he asked me i'd probably have no problem with it. Probably.
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On September 02 2011 11:44 phiinix wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2011 11:38 CaptainPlatypus wrote:
I'm hesitant to get into an ethics discussion on TL, but if anyone (OP?) is interested in learning more on this topic, I can recommend some literature. A tad. I'd be down for a good read. Hopefully deep, but not too dense?
Well I'm a philosophy major and a total nerd, so I'm not sure I have the most....realistic...grasp of what is and isn't dense. 
Basically, this is similar to the question of utilitarian (or in more modern times, consequentialist) ethics versus deontological ethics. Those are very long and complicated words for a very simple idea. Consequentialism holds that you should consider the consequences, above all else, when making ethical decisions. Deontology holds the opposite - that you should consider your actions above all else when making ethical decisions. So a deontologist would say something incredibly word that meant "killing is bad, so if you kill someone, that's bad, even if it saves 100 other people", and a consequentialist would say "since life is good, and more people are alive if you kill the one guy, you should kill the one guy".
The question as to whether it's your best friend or not is less directly ethical and more a question of your priorities (though it assumes a consequentialist viewpoint - like I mentioned, a deontologist would reflexively say "no" to both options given because killing is wrong so fuck you). I can't think off the top of my head of any famous/authority-figure-type philosophers who would argue that saving your best friend is more important than saving 100 other people, or I'd provide a relevant link. Really it's more a personal choice than anything else, and the important part is that in ethics, there's more than one right answer. That isn't to say there are no wrong answers, you could say 'i ride in on an elephant and trample all 101 while eating an ice cream sundae' and that would be a wrong answer, but every answer available in the poll is "right".
Anyway, in case that wasn't tl;DR for everyone ALREADY, here's the consequentialist viewpoint:
http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html
The deontological viewpoint is harder to find a single brief more-or-less-summary of, especially from famous figures in its history, because it's just older like that. Kant is considered the father of deontology, and here's his book on the subject:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1460377
But that's been translated from German and I'm not the biggest fan of that particular translation, so have this discussion of Kant and Hume (Hume was a brilliant philosopher but his work is considered somewhat out of date these days, unjustly IMHO) from a Stanford professor:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-morality/
Also super long (though not an entire book, so it's got one up on the above link), but really really good. In fact the SEP is like a philosophy degree, but as a webpage. Highly recommended.
TL;DR: I don't know what kind of dumbass would TL;DR a reading recommendation, it seems counter productive, but go read Kant, Anscombe, Bentham, and every single person mentioned on the Wikipedia 'ethics' page and, since no one is going to read any of these anyway, I may as well recommend Augustine as well because fuck yeah ancient Christian philosophy that makes no sense.
Oh, and one final note: Knowing my best friend, I'd get called a fag if I picked his life over 100 others.
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In the second scenario, if we're looking at it from an overhead perspective, it would be obvious that the lives of 100 outweighs the life of 1, but from a first person standpoint, the whole story changes. Now it's a choice between letting 1 person die with the psychological effects of directly killing that person, or letting 100 people die with the psychological effects of causing those 100 people to die through a decision you made.
Personally, I'd just let the 100 people die since killing someone directly would affect me much more. I'm a selfish person who wouldn't even donate a nickel to feed an African child for a day. Let those 100 people die, I ain't doing shit about it.
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I don't have any friends but presuming I did I would let 100 strangers die to save someone I cared about because I'm selfish
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T________T
These questions are so hard to answer  I really don't want to kill anyone, but is it justified if you are saving 100x more people in the process?
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Yes/no.
I don't value people's life the same. It's as easy as that.
Doing nothing (by not killing 1) is not taking the moral high ground. You can not absolve yourself by saying "it's not up to me to play god". Doing nothing is also an action. The statement of the moral question does not care, it is absolute. Say the question was stated such that you had to actively kill the 100 people. Would it change your answer?
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No to both questions, since I don't believe that killing innocents is ever justified. Although the utilitarian argument seems reasonable on first inspection, I find many of the implications extremely troubling.
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The answers SHOULD both be a 'no' so you you're not the one killing anybody but it gets tricky because 100x that amount dies as a direct result.
I voted yes to both cuz I think Ip Man would do the same.
Ip Man kicks alotta ass, you guys.
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I don't get why this situation has to be forced into a deontological/consequentialist perspective. Once either branch of normative ethics are picked, there's going to be a million people doing the whole "fuck why don't we just moral calculus everything in sight" or "lol what are you going to do when 2 rights clash" thing. So why don't we just do a middle of the ground perspective based on our initial values?
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On September 03 2011 03:08 ChinaLifeXXL wrote:
The answers SHOULD both be a 'no' so you you're not the one killing anybody but it gets tricky because 100x that amount dies as a direct result.
I voted yes to both cuz I think Ip Man would do the same.
Ip Man kicks alotta ass, you guys.
Are you kidding me? Ip Man wouldn't say yes or no, he'd go and kick ass and save the 100 through wing chun. Duh.
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EPT
